Back at the villa, Reiji first checked the backpack behind the curtain and confirmed nobody had touched it, so he stopped worrying about it.

He took out his Poké Balls and released all his Pokémon. Ditto hopped down from his face, and Spinarak climbed off his shoulder so they could finally rest.

They’d all worked hard tonight, so once Reiji was home he put together a late-night snack for the whole team.

While the Pokémon were eating, he checked his watch. It was only eleven at night. He still had time to run another evolution test for Gastly and see if the stuff he’d just bought could finally push Gastly through the Champion threshold.

He brought just himself and Gastly into the storage room and started the evolution test.

Thirty-three gems, ten rounds of evolving and devolving. Every time Gastly evolved, its potential broke into Champion tier, and every time it devolved back, that potential dropped back out again.

By the time he’d consumed all thirty-three gems, Gastly still hadn’t crossed fully into Champion tier—but it had reached the very edge.

[Gastly (shiny)]

[Type: Ghost + Poison]

[Gender: Male]

[Potential: 79.99%]

[Level: 4.23%]

[Ability: …]

“Gastly, I’m beat. Eat this and get a good night’s sleep,” Reiji said, taking out the last three kilograms of toxin and dumping it all into Gastly’s wide mouth, then letting it evolve into Haunter to digest the poison.

“Gaaastly, gaaastly…” Gastly licked its lips. Finally, more delicious toxin.

Gastly swallowed the three kilos of poison in one go and promptly went woozy, but it still remembered the command to evolve. White light flashed around it as it turned into Haunter, then it passed out cold.

Reiji pulled up Haunter’s status. Its potential had indeed entered Champion tier, but once it devolved it would just drop back down to quasi-Champion again. There was nothing he could do about it; he would just have to grind through it slowly.

He had no idea how much energy Gastly would need to swallow to clear the Champion threshold. He was already tracking every bit of it in a little notebook.

Once Haunter fell asleep, Reiji recalled it to its Poké Ball and went back to the living room. He tossed Haunter’s ball casually on the table—he’d check in tomorrow to see if it had woken up.

He sat down on the sofa, set the incubator on the table to charge, then took out the 550,000 and his notebook.

He ran through his recent expenses: thirty-three thousand on ingredients last week; ninety thousand for a month’s villa rent; fifty thousand on honey on the way back; another thirty thousand on a week’s worth of food; ten thousand as a finder’s fee for the bartender; ten thousand for boat fare; ten thousand to get onto the black ship.

Total: 233,000.

Previous balance: 1,203,000.

Add in the new 550,000, and his current balance was: 1,520,000. A little over one and a half million.

Still hovering in the low millions. Still dirt poor.

Man, this was rough. Gastly could really eat…

After tallying up his costs, Reiji pulled a blanket out of his backpack, glanced at Gastly’s Poké Ball, and decided to sleep on the sofa.

He was keeping careful track of Gastly’s total consumption. He wanted to know just how much it would take to force Gastly’s potential to the absolute limit. Even if it cost two hundred million, he was going to keep feeding it in.

He told Spinarak to stay on watch, then lay down under the blanket and drifted off.

And that night, he had another nightmare—chased by a horde of monsters all night long.

This was the third nightmare. The first had been yesterday at noon, the second last night back in the inland town’s villa. Tonight made the third.

And it wasn’t just him. His Pokémon were having nightmares too—everyone except Gastly.

“Gaaastly, gaaastly, so much tasty stuff, so much tasty stuff…”

In its dream, Gastly was drooling, guzzling down the food Reiji had fed it before. The treats that he usually rationed out to it were now piled up into little mountains—food everywhere.

“Gaaastly, gaaastly…”

Just as Gastly lifted another bite to its mouth, the food suddenly rotted away in its hands. When it looked down, every treat in those little mountains had gone foul and rotten. Not a single edible piece was left.

“Gaaastly…” Gastly bristled, furious, and swept its gaze around. Who had stolen its food? Who?

“Gastly, how are you evolving and devolving like that? Can you teach me?”

“Gaaastly, gaaastly—was it you who stole my food?” Gastly heard a voice and spun around, only to see Darkrai standing behind it.

“Gastly, I didn’t steal your food. This is a dream. All that food is fake,” Darkrai said patiently when it saw how attached Gastly was to the food.

“Gaaastly, I don’t care, I don’t care! That’s the food Reiji gave me—that’s my food!” Gastly refused to believe this was a dream. In an instant it evolved from Gastly into Haunter, then again into Gengar, and lunged at Darkrai.

A Gengar with no proper training stood no chance at all. In the dream, Darkrai simply pinned it to the ground and wiped the floor with it.

Gengar refused to accept that. It was going to teach this food thief a lesson…

“Gaaastly…”

Light flared over Gengar’s body again. A seven-colored halo swept across its form as it changed into Mega Gengar.

Mega Gengar’s outline hadn’t changed much, but spikes now jutted from every part of its body. Even its tail had grown barbs. Normally, the lower half of Mega Gengar’s body was a wine red, with a coin-like disc set in the center of its forehead, a hollow opening in the middle.

But this Mega Gengar looked nothing like that. It wasn’t the snowy white of a shiny Gengar, and it wasn’t the normal purple-red either. Its whole body was black streaked with red.

Just looking at it was unsettling. Even its grin was crooked with malice, and its eyes were a bloodthirsty crimson. The sight alone put Darkrai on edge.

“Gastly? A new form? You have a new form?” Darkrai stared at it, completely baffled. Gengar could evolve again? Since when?

“Gaaastly, gaaastly…” Mega Gengar glanced down at itself when Darkrai mentioned its appearance. It had no idea why it looked like this, or why it could Mega Evolve at all.

All it knew was that to beat this guy and take back its food, it needed more power—and then it had turned into this. Completely on instinct, Gengar had hit the trigger for Mega Evolution and become Mega Gengar.

Feeling the power surging inside, Mega Gengar immediately gathered a ball of shadowy energy in front of its mouth and fired a Shadow Ball straight at Darkrai.

Darkrai answered with a Dark Pulse. The two moves collided and exploded.

Then Mega Gengar turned into an artillery turret, relentlessly hurling Shadow Ball after Shadow Ball at Darkrai. Whenever Darkrai couldn’t fully block them, it took the hits head-on.

If Reiji had been there, he would’ve called Gastly an idiot. Ghost-type moves against a Dark-type like Darkrai were resisted. If it wanted double damage, it needed Fighting, Fairy or Bug—neither of which Gengar had.

Darkrai’s Dark Pulse, on the other hand, hit Gengar for super-effective damage. Every blast hurt like hell.

“Gaaastly, gaaastly… it hurts so much. Why doesn’t it feel anything?” Mega Gengar couldn’t understand why Darkrai seemed fine even though it had landed way more hits.

“Gastly, this really is a dream. I just want to talk. I’m not here to fight you,” Darkrai said helplessly. It wasn’t actually unharmed; this was a Mega Gengar’s Shadow Ball, after all.

It was just that relative to Gengar, they were trading four Shadow Balls for one Dark Pulse. As long as it answered with a single blast each time, they were about even.

Seeing that Gastly was completely unreasonable and refused to listen, Darkrai simply blew Gastly up—along with the dream itself.

If Reiji had gotten up to use the bathroom just then, he would have seen Haunter’s Poké Ball on the table rocking nonstop. That was Haunter thrashing inside as it fought Darkrai in its dream.

Once Darkrai shattered the dream, Gastly opened its eyes inside the Poké Ball and realized it was still in there. No food. No Darkrai.

Through the ball, it could see Reiji asleep on the sofa, with the other Pokémon curled against him. It finally realized that really might have been a dream.

Then Haunter drifted back to sleep.

And once again, mountains of food appeared before it. It happily started eating—only for the food to rot away, just like before.

It knew immediately whose fault that was. Before Darkrai could even say a word, Gastly had already spotted it, evolved straight into Mega Gengar, fired off a Shadow Ball, and snarled, “Gaaastly, gaaastly—give me back my food!”

“Gastly, I told you, this is a dream,” Darkrai said, completely exasperated. Gastly still hadn’t processed it. It kept treating the dream as reality. All Darkrai wanted was to ask how it could evolve and devolve at will, but dragging that answer out of Gastly was turning out to be ridiculously hard.

It just couldn’t understand how this little Gastly’s entire world could revolve around food. If it ever found out that Gastly had voluntarily devolved just so it could keep eating, then it would truly understand just how far this thing would go for a good meal.

Once again, it beat Gastly into the ground and shattered the dream.

The third time it tried, the same thing happened. Gastly didn’t say a word—just hurled another Shadow Ball, Mega Evolved, and turned into a mobile artillery platform. Darkrai wrestled it down and crushed the dream again.

And so it went, over and over through the night. After being beaten a dozen times, Gastly was completely numb. By the end, whenever Darkrai appeared, it didn’t even want to look at it.

Gastly now understood this was a dream. But so what? All it wanted was to eat in peace. That annoying guy kept barging in and ruining everything. If Darkrai didn’t show up, the food wouldn’t rot. Watching its food decay in front of it—that was the real nightmare.

Since it couldn’t beat Darkrai, it stopped trying. Instead, it roamed the dreamscape hunting for more food. Even if the food rotted in the next instant, it didn’t care. Gastly discovered that as long as it tossed the food into its mouth first, even if it decayed, it would at least decay in its mouth.

“Gastly, if you teach me, I’ll give you more food,” Darkrai finally said. It could tell Gastly loved food, so it conjured up a massive pile of treats and asked Gastly to teach it how to control evolution.

“Gaaastly, gaaastly…” Gastly ate until it was stuffed before finally explaining, “I don’t know how I evolve either. I just want to eat tasty things, then I can evolve and devolve…”

“Just wanting to eat?” Darkrai still didn’t get it. Could craving food really be that strong, strong enough to force evolution?

“Gaaastly. If there’s good food, I evolve. I only devolved and followed Reiji because I wanted more food then too,” Gastly said, going into more detail about how it ended up with Reiji in the first place.

“That human?” Darkrai remembered the man who had been making Gastly evolve and devolve. It was the energy waves from those constant evolutions that had drawn Darkrai over in the first place.

“If you’ve got questions, why not ask him? He’s the one who knows how evolution works,” Gastly said, licking a huge Ghost-type gem that was bigger than its own face. “He’s given me so much food that I can’t even finish it all. It’s all so delicious…”

” ‘That human’?”

Darkrai had actually wanted to meet him. It just hadn’t managed to last time. And with a willpower like that, it wasn’t easy to drag the guy into a nightmare. Last time, the human had simply walked out of the dream by killing himself inside it.

For Darkrai, that level of self-control was a first.

And when the man had left, he’d even tossed out a line about “don’t even think about succeeding.” Darkrai still had no idea what that was supposed to mean. It hadn’t wanted anything. How was it suddenly the villain trying to “succeed” at something? It felt completely wronged.

If it weren’t for the way its nightmares kept leaking and hurting nearby humans and Pokémon, if it weren’t afraid that people couldn’t accept it, it would have shown itself a long time ago. It wouldn’t need to be hiding and chasing down Gastly for answers like this.

“He’s called Reiji. He’s a Trainer. Stop calling him ‘that human’ all the time,” Gastly said earnestly. In its simple little mind, Reiji was the best Trainer in the world. He’d promised all the food it could eat and had never broken that promise. Of course it wanted to defend him.

“I don’t dare show myself to him. Humans are afraid of me,” Darkrai said, shaking its head and giving up on the idea of appearing before Reiji.

“Gaaastly, do whatever you want. Just don’t get in the way of me eating,” Gastly said. It felt way too small like this. Licking a big gem was slow. So it thought about getting bigger—and it did. Its body expanded, its tongue grew longer and thicker, and it went right back to licking the now-shrunken Ghost gem.

Watching Gastly eat that happily made Darkrai swallow unconsciously. “You’ve got so much Ghost-type energy… can’t you share some Dark-type energy with me?”

“Gaaastly, not a chance. Reiji gave me all this,” Gastly said, scooping up the Ghost gem with its big pink tongue and hiding it away. “If you want some, go find him yourself. When he catches us, it’s all-you-can-eat and all-you-can-sleep. We can eat as much as we want.”

No way it was sharing its food with the guy who kept beating it up.

“Ahem. Fine, fine, forget it. Stingy,” Darkrai muttered. The skin under its white crest tingled, a strange prickly sensation—embarrassment. It had no idea how it’d even managed to ask that out loud. After pummeling someone that many times, then asking them to share their food—what kind of logic was that?

“Dawn’s almost here. I’m leaving. See you,” Darkrai said, backing out of the dream. If it stayed any longer, Reiji and the rest would wake up.

“Gaaastly, gaaastly. Bye-bye,” Gastly said, watching Darkrai vanish before materializing its Ghost gem again and licking away contentedly.

That Ghost gem was simply the leftover energy from its evolutions that Gastly had failed to digest. Darkrai had just given it form in the dream. It only worked in dreams—there was no way to just whip up a chunk of Ghost gems like that in reality.

Energy didn’t disappear for no reason. Gastly had simply eaten too much and hadn’t converted it all into potential yet. It needed to sleep and slowly digest the excess, then feed it back into its potential and level.

Out in the real world, there was no such giant Ghost gem. In terms of raw energy density, the best thing humans could get their hands on was top-grade Dusk Stones.

If you were talking about the absolute peak, Reiji guessed it would be things like Arceus’s Plates, that stone that could push a first-rank legendary into Mega Evolution, and the raw power stored inside the legendary Pokémon themselves. Those were the true high-density energy cores.

In reality, once Darkrai slipped out of Gastly’s dream, it appeared up on the ceiling and looked down at Reiji asleep on the sofa, surrounded by his sleeping Pokémon.

It only watched for a moment. Then as dawn’s first light began to seep through the windows, Darkrai melted back into the darkness. It still hadn’t decided whether to show itself to this human, or how the man would react if he did. If Reiji started to fear or hate it because of the nightmares, then maybe it was better not to show up at all.

With Darkrai gone, the black of night slowly gave way to gray, and then to pale morning.

A new day had begun.

(End of Chapter)

[100 Power Stones = Extra Chapter]

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